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Roderick Williams’ and Julius Drake’s English Winter Journey seems such a perfect concept that one wonders why no one had previously thought of compiling a sequence of 24 songs by English composers to mirror, complement and discourse with Schubert’s song-cycle of love and loss.

Opening night at the Metropolitan is a gleeful occasion even when the
composer is long gone, but December 1st was an opening for a living composer who
has been making waves around the world and is, gasp, a woman — the second woman
composer ever to have an opera presented at the Met.

The Feast at Solhaug : Henrik Ibsen's play Gildet paa Solhaug (1856) inspired Wilhelm Stenhammer's opera Gillet på Solhaug. The world premiere recording is now available via Sterling CD, in a 3 disc set which includes full libretto and background history.

For an opera that has never quite made it over the threshold into the ‘canonical’, the adolescent Mozart’s La finta giardiniera has not done badly of late for productions in the UK. In 2014, Glyndebourne presented Frederic Wake-Walker’s take on the eighteen-year-old’s dramma giocoso. Wake-Walker turned the romantic shenanigans and skirmishes into a debate on the nature of reality, in which the director tore off layers of theatrical artifice in order to answer Auden’s rhetorical question, ‘O tell me the truth about love’.

Heading to N.Y.C and D.C. for its annual performances, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra invited Semyon Bychkov to return for his Mahler debut with the Fifth Symphony. Having recently returned from Vienna with praise for their rendition, the orchestra now presented it at their homebase.

Igor Stravinsky's lost Funeral Song, (Chante funèbre) op 5 conducted by Valery Gergiev at the Mariinsky in St Petersburg This extraordinary performance was infinitely more than an ordinary concert, even for a world premiere of an unknown work.

On Tuesday evening this week, I found myself at The Actors Centre in London’s Covent Garden watching a performance of Unknowing, a dramatization of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben and Dichterliebe (in a translation by David Parry, in which Matthew Monaghan directed a baritone and a soprano as they enacted a narrative of love, life and loss. Two days later at the Wigmore Hall I enjoyed a wonderful performance, reviewed here, by countertenor Philippe Jaroussky with Julien Chauvin’s Le Concert de la Loge, of cantatas by Telemann and J.S. Bach.

Here is one of the next new great conductors. That’s a bold statement,
but even the L.A. Times agrees: Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s appointment
“is the biggest news in the conducting world.” But Ms. Mirga
Gražinytė-Tyla will be getting a lot of weight on her shoulders.

Macabre and moonstruck, Schubert as Goth, with Stuart Jackson, Marcus Farnsworth and James Baillieu at the Wigmore Hall. An exceptionally well-planned programme devised with erudition and wit, executed to equally high standards.

On November 20, 2016, Arizona Opera completed its run of Antonín Dvořák’s fairy Tale opera, Rusalka. Loosely based on Hand Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, Joshua Borths staged it with common objects such as dining room chairs that could be found in the home of a child watching the story unfold.

If there was ever any doubt that Puccini’s Manon is on a road to nowhere, then the closing image of Jonathan Kent’s 2014 production of Manon Lescaut (revived here for the first time, by Paul Higgins) leaves no uncertainty.

Many opera singers are careful to maintain an air of political neutrality. Not so mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who is outspoken about causes she holds dear. Her latest project, a very personal response to the 2015 terror attacks in Paris, puts her audience through the emotional wringer, but also showers them with musical rewards.

I wonder if Karl Amadeus Hartmann saw something of himself in the young Simplicius Simplicissimus, the eponymous protagonist of his three-scene chamber opera of 1936. Simplicius is in a sort of ‘Holy Fool’ who manages to survive the violence and civil strife of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), largely through dumb chance, and whose truthful pronouncements fall upon the ears of the deluded and oppressive.

For its second opera of the 2016-17 season Lyric Opera of Chicago has staged Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in a production seen at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Grand Théâtre de Genève.

Gerhaher has been singing at the Wigmore Hall for years, so regular Lieder
audiences know him well. He shot into stardom with more mainstream opera
audiences with his Wolfram in Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Royal
Opera House last year, which was reviewed
in Opera Today. Gerhaher’s Wolfram was sensationally beautiful, perfectly
fitting the other worldly, rarified purity that is in Wolfram’s character.
Few baritones have that tenor-like lightness of touch. Gerhaher’s Wolfram
shimmered, but Elisabeth still chose Tannhäuser. Think what Wagner meant by
that.

Vocal music, almost by definition, is about meaning. One of the fundamental
differences between opera and Lieder is how meaning is expressed. It’s not
simply a question of refinement or detail, but of perspective. In opera, an
artist creates a character defined by plot and music. In Lieder, the character
“is” the artist himself. In opera, a singer is expressing what the role
represents in the context of the opera. In most Lieder, text is confined to a
few lines from which a singer must extract maximum possible meaning. No help
from plot or orchestra. Opera singing is more extrospective. Lieder singing is more introspective.

The Schubert song cycles Die schöne Müllerin (D795) and
Winterreise (D911) allow more context than single songs, but their
narrative is internal, not external. Significantly, both are journeys, where
landscape marks stages in the protagonists’ inner development. Gerhaher and
Huber also gave a recital of Schwanengesang (D957), but it’s not
actually a song cycle but a compilation put together by Schubert’s publisher
after his death.

Die schöne Müllerin is interpretively more challenging because of
its deliberate contradictions — cheerfully babbling brooks and declarations
of love. But for whom, and by whom? The high tessitura is meant to
suggest the miller’s naivety. It’s a complication that a light, airy
baritone like Gerhaher doesn’t have to contend with, so the cycle is a good
test of his interpretive skills. This performance was infinitely better than
his recording with budget label Arte Nova six years ago, which fortunately will
be superseded with a new recording. Gerhaher uses his range more effectively,
and is more secure shaping phrases. His singing is particularly attractive in
songs like “Des Müllers Blumen” which could be mistaken for a love song,
out of context. Yet almost from the beginning the poems hint at altogether more
sinister levels. The emotional range in this cycle is much more challenging
than the vocal range. In “Der Jäger”, the miller’s jealousy erupts into
anger. Gerhaher expresses this through increased volume and projection, which
is effective enough, but doesn’t have quite the emotional wildness that can
make this song so troubling. Gerhaher’s miller isn’t menacing, even in
“Die böse Farbe ”with its hints of what today we’d call stalking, but
a poetic dreamer. Gerhaher is pleasant, but if you want limpid sweetness, Fritz
Wunderlich sings with such exquisite poise, his emotional denial is
chilling.

What made this recital unusual was the inclusion of three poems from Wilhelm
Müller’s original set of 25, which Schubert did not set. “Das
Mühlenleben” describes the girl at the mill, but comes between “Der
Neugierige ”and “Ungeduld,” which rather breaks the mood. On the
other hand placing it after “Am Feierabend” extends that mood too long.
More effective is “Erster Schmerz, letzter Scherz” before “Der liebe
Farbe” and “Blümlien Vergissmein ”after “Die böse Farbe”,
for the spoken poems garland the two companion songs. Gerhaher’s reading of
“Blümlien Vergissmein” was lyrical, leading smoothly into “Trockne
Blumen,” the poem enhancing the song.

In Winterreise the protagonist is leaving behind a relatively real world and
heading into the unknown. There are far fewer clues to his psyche in the text.
That’s why Winterreise is so fascinating, because the possibilities are even
greater. Performers have to connect to something in themselves to create an
individual approach that conveys something personal to the audience.

Those who’ve come to Gerhaher and Lieder via Wolfram in Tannhäuser will
admire the clean tone and even timbre of Gerhaher’s singing. There’s plenty
of scenic beauty in Winterreise, and some performances I’ve heard
make much of the external-internal interface, but Gerhaher describes rather
than contemplates. Individual songs like “Frühlingstraum ”are
beautifully modulated. Winterreise moves in stages, and the structure
of this cycle is significant. The protagonist is heading somewhere, even if we
don’t know what will come of it. Is the Leiermann a symbol, and of what? Does
the cycle end in death, madness or, even more controversially, of resistance?
Here, we’re admiring Gerhaher’s smooth technique, so for a change, it’s
up to us to be the servant of the music and what it might mean.